Understand and Achieve

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18 November 2009, Bhubaneswar, India

I hope all of you are reading Whispers [from the Brighter World]. You get it on your computer every morning (those who have computers). Otherwise, you should have the book and read one message every day. You know, it is a strange thing in our Sanskrit, shall we say, praacheen kaal [ancient times] — we have something which is called ashariri vaak [voice from above]. It is supposed to be the most important and divine.

When we live and speak it is all these stories and Puranas and ithihasas [epics], you know, geography, history, what you study in schools. We have eighteen Puranas but we don’t accept them as divine, because in our ancient classification, there is shruti and there is smriti. Shruti is ashariri vaak — something we don’t get from somebody who is embodied here. Revealed knowledge; heard. That is why it is called shruti. That is divine. The Puranas come under smriti. Somebody has thought about them and written about them — a human, however high.

So, to my thinking, our Babuji’s messages in Whispers, volumes 1 and 2, they belong to the category of shruti, because, nobody went and thought about them, wrote them or typed them on a typewriter or whatever. They came, they were received and they were written. Like in Babuji’s one book, he says he “got it directly from above.” So these are worthy of the greatest attention. Some of them may appear not to have any particular message, but don’t ignore it because of that, because whatever is the message in it, you will understand after you read it many times.

You know there is a wonderful saying that, if you wrote in the English language continuously without gaps between words, you wouldn’t be able to make any sense out of it. It is the gap that gives the meaning to the word. In a similar sense, in our day of activity, it is the moment when we pause, when we meditate, go deep into ourselves that gives meaning to the rest of life. This is the period of pause — one hour, when nothing connects us to this world. Nothing should connect us to this world. We go deep into ourselves in that blank space which is the space between two words on the paper, and there find the meaning on both sides.

What do we find in our case, in our meditation? We find the meaning between this life and the hereafter — the future life. It is very important to know; we think we understand this life — we don’t. We are caught in this life. We are prisoners in this life — giraftaar. We cannot say we are free in this life. Most of us don’t have even freedom to breathe properly. We have no freedom to think properly, or to think at all. And in today’s society we have no freedom to do anything. Even our votes are corrupted. We are cheated at every turn. So, where is the freedom? “We are a free nation, biggest democracy in the world,” et cetera, et cetera — all nice to hear and to forget.

We must remember that the only freedom is the freedom of the soul, which has been, and should be now, and must be in the future. That freedom has to be earned, because in some way, that soul has become unfortunately imprisoned in this body of flesh and blood. It is liberation (that is what it means) — liberating the soul so that it is no more encapsulated in this stupid body of flesh and blood, with its needs, with its health and non-health, desires, corruption, sickness, old age, all these things.

I think the other day I told you about janma, mrityu, jaraa and vyaadhi — the four original unwanted things according to Vedic literature. To be born is the first unwelcome thing. It means we are here, captive for a particular number of years, and during those years we are going to be subject to old age, to sickness, to death — not merely ours, but others, beloved ones. We have to weep, we have to laugh; we have to earn, we have to spend. So, you see, to be born… that is why we have always been striving to avoid being re-born — mukti [liberation]. But it is not something to escape from. This life, if we are wise, we will realize it is given to us so that we can use it in spite of all these problems of life and death, illness and health, temptations, poverty and riches. In spite of all this, we have to go through this life, make sure that we are not again coming here — not as an escape but as an evolution into something higher.

That is the difference between people who are always crying and weeping and saying, “Why am I here? Why am I here?” yet not wanting to leave this place. If you offer them now, [this] moment, liberation, they are not ready. They will say, “No, no, I am only forty,” “I am only twenty-five,” “I am only eighty.” There was an old man, an abhyasi in Bombay who used to telephone me on his birthday every year. The first time I got his phone [call], he was eighty-one. He was living alone, because his wife had been dead for fifteen years, children were all somewhere. He was alone on the sixth floor of a building, in a flat where a lady came and cooked his breakfast, his lunch and dinner, put it all on the table and went away. From that time he was alone. And yet, every birthday, he said, “Guruji, please bless me with longer life.” He did it till he was eighty-five. And the prayer was the same, “Please bless me with long life.” I didn’t want to hurt him by asking, “What do you live for? Why do you want to live more?” Don’t you think it is crazy?

Remember what Babuji Maharaj has said, that the golden cage is no better than a wooden cage, because you are in a cage; the gold belongs to the maalik [owner]. It is not yours; you are a parrot in a cage. What does it matter whether it is gold or silver or bamboo? It is like two birds, side by side, one in a golden cage and one in a bamboo cage. The bird in the golden cage boasting, “Look at me. I am powerful, I am rich.” In the bamboo cage, that bird says, “Well, we are both in the same situation,” and the bird in the golden cage laughs.

This is the situation with our powerful people, with our rich people, with our dominant people who think they are here to rule us, govern us, and they enjoy everything — little knowing their fate. You know, it is like the pharaohs of Egypt who were buried in gold — so many coffins one inside the other, and the last one in a stone one so that it should not be robbed. This [the body] has to go — whether you clothe it in silk or it is naked, it has to go. And our duty is to prepare for this departure with all possible care, with all possible devotion, with the knowledge that we have to go somewhere which is not here, and where there are no pains, no illnesses, and of course, no pleasures, no health, no enjoyment. You cannot have one without the other.

This is the world of duality. Pain and pleasure, health and ill-health, poverty and riches, virtue and vice, they go together. You can never have one without the other. So when you want to leave this world for the brighter world, it is foolish to think that in devaloka or Indra-loka [abode of the gods] or whatever, we will be at peace, happy. I don’t know what is peace and happiness unless I have been without peace and unhappy. You know one by the other. If you ask a man who is alone in this world (no second person), “Are you lonely?” he will not know what you mean. Unless you have been with some people, you do not know what loneliness is. He will not know what is ill health or health, because he is, that is all.

So, the voice of the Master in Whispers, delivered as shruti, re-emphasizes again and again that this world is in for a big change as a result of (I don’t know) colossal upheavals — maybe cosmic, maybe human, maybe warfare. He tells us to prepare for it, to participate in it and to cooperate with it, cheerfully, understanding that we are part of that process ourselves. We don’t put a ser [about one kilogram] of potatoes in boiling water to cook and ask them to cooperate or be prepared for the boiling. We are similarly potatoes in the cosmic hand. If you don’t cook, if you cannot be cooked, you will be taken out and thrown away.

So, I think that is all I should say this morning — bad enough, because I don’t expect to speak to you again on this trip. But please make sure… that even if Babuji Maharaj says, “This is not a message,” there is a message in it. Denial of anything is, in a way, affirmation of the same thing. You understand?

So, please probe into the meaning of those things. Don’t just read the two lines or the three lines and say, “Bekaar hai. [It is useless.]” The Divine voice is never useless. It is always silent. It is always crisp, terse — what they call sutra form [aphorism]. And it needs patience and reading and re-reading again and again, before you will understand. I pray that all of you will do it — understand and achieve.